The Room
by The Dishwasher
Summary: Sarah visits her old home and decides to sleep in her old bedroom, but her stepmother had rearranged everything. Sarah hates it when people move her things! But her room is not the only thing that has changed: she's not the same Sarah anymore, and the Labyrinth wishes to remind her of that. One-shot.


**The Room**

As soon as she opened the door and peered into the room, Sarah knew that coming to see the old house was a mistake. Nothing was as she remembered, her room most of all. The floor could scarcely be seen for boxes piled up in towers, picture frames complete and in pieces, cases of paint, easels, and endless canvasses. Karen had taken to painting. Sarah had to grasp the door frame for support. Her bedroom had been repurposed, but she could still imagine her old dresser with its trinkets and photos of her mother, and the scent of her very first perfume almost lingered in the air. She remembered her oak bookshelves brimming with favourite stories, but as her eyes travelled to the bed she became angry, trembled, the angle was all wrong, it wasn't supposed to be like this at all!

Karen said she would have the room ready and cleaned up in time, just like old times, she'd said, but there was an exhibition you see, and storage space was so necessary. Still Sarah insisted that she would sleep there, in this strange room which once contained her special world. Her hate built up and spread to her arms, she swiped at the boxes, shoved everything to the far wall of the room. Be careful with the frames, said Karen's voice in her mind, and she smirked at the violence with which she had shifted her stepmother's things. She moved the bed too, recapturing some of the familiar arrangement of her room. But when, after a dinner with stilted conversation and overcooked vegetables, she lay in her bed, the shadows on the walls gave her no comfort. The curtains had been changed and they no longer cast the Fairytale in Lace, as she liked to call it, where, through a combination of the net and the trees outside, the moon would stage an elaborate tale, with dragons and knights and witches, that Sarah would watch night after night. But Karen had installed blinds, and vertical bars fell across her face.

Sarah hadn't slept here for years, not since moving out to go to college. Her old bed would not accept her form, as though embittered for being forgotten; no matter how Sarah turned, the springs would find a way to scratch her back, and the mattress would buckle underneath her, creaking and groaning. She decided to check for monsters under the bed, her hair pooled on the floor, but all she found was a small figurine which she remembered to be Hoggle. He lay there, dusty and cold, impossible to tell how long. And her room rippled with memory then, the shadow strips twisted on the walls, she heard noises that gave her an odd sensation of prickly, but tolerable fear. Now I must sleep, she thought, aware that she was wandering into a dream, now that I'm home.

Won't you do me the honour? He asked quietly, wanting her to remember, and it could have been the wind for all she could tell, she did not notice anyone come in. But she couldn't honour his request, she felt her face grow feverishly warm and her feet and hands ice cold, she lay immobile and dry-mouthed, the sheets barely covered her. Sarah felt that she was very distant from the person who used to live in this room, and this realisation terrified her, the thought that she, gradually, unexpectedly, turned into this present Sarah, betrayed her childhood, forgotten herself. The younger Sarah glared at her older self, stomped her foot angrily and crushed a painting. How could Karen not hear any of this?

She wrapped her arms around knees, protecting herself from the animosity of her childhood as the room and its possessions ganged up on her. All you have to do is say it, isn't that right, Sarah? She wouldn't capitulate. Maybe rearranging the room was all a mistake. Maybe it was for the best that Karen had taken over this space, made it into a functional little studio. But now Hoggle growled at her, he said that he had been abandoned, that it was all her fault! He sided with Young Sarah. Think you're so grown-up because of your lipstick and stockings, they hissed, inching towards her, think you're so smart now that you've got your hair to stop frizzing and now that your teeth are straight? We'll pull out those pretty teeth one by one my sweet! The toothfairy will be in for a real treat tonight!

And no matter where Sarah ran, the shadow bars grew and cut off any escape, solidified, and she rattled them with her hands, hit them with her failing strength, for the girl with the long hair and the paper crown was coming for her, she, who used to be here before college and stockings and grown-up things. The enchanted jungle burst in through the bars, her bare feet now stood on a carpet of needles and decaying leaves. She was sure a snake or lizard of some sort had slid around her, thought she saw its tail in the uncertain grey light of the room. Take her head off! Someone yelled, and a knife glinted in the pale moonbeam. Sarah pressed up against the bed, which became Ludo, that's right, good old Ludo, who bared his fangs, his eyes unusually red. He hungrily licked his lips.

Do you not recall, said the wind in a human voice, or maybe an owl cooed outside, that this Goblin King had given you certain powers? Yes, yes, it was in that little book of hers, nowhere to be seen in this nightmare of a room, she will have to remember what words must be said. These horrible creatures and Young Sarah, who had grown in height, almost reaching the ceiling, had backed her up into a corner. They were coming for her teeth and for her lipstick, for her head! In which order Sarah did not know. But somewhere she thought it made sense, did she not have to repent and suffer for the treachery which she had committed growing up?

It does not end like this, the voice spoke again, the story has no end. Sarah rested her burning, heavy head on someone's shoulder, and thought back to a dream she once wove, long ago, where she accepted that she would have to grow up one day. And that was just so, she thought as this idea entered her mind, I cannot be a child always. She glared back at her younger self who at this point towered over her.

"You're bang out of line," Sarah said, "I'll have you grounded for this. Leave your toys alone, leave me alone, and go back to sleep, if you don't know how to behave in front of your elders."

Young Sarah deliberated but her cheeks flushed pink. She was about to say something when Sarah interrupted, feeling inspired,

"I said now young lady! Maybe you need a reminder of what happens to spoilt little girls who don't do as they're told?"

And at this, Young Sarah had shrunk back to her initial height, kept shrinking further and further, until nothing could be seen at all. Sarah's eyes became accustomed to the room in the trickery of the night, where all was now quiet, no monsters, just a dusty old figurine in the darkness under the bed, and the suggestions of a marvellous story sketched in shadows upon the wall.


End file.
